Folding Forum

There is some work being done to provide WU's for single core processing, including on OS X. One project is on hold after running into problems, hopefully they will be straightened out. In the meantime there a few projects with that type of WU listed as available, but I can't tell how many. There was also an assignment server issue a few weeks ago connecting requests for single core WU's to appropriate WS's. The failure to connect when set for a single core (medium) might be that problem popping up again.

Reducing folding power should work, but there might still be a few kinks to get worked out. Up until recently folding for OS X on Intel processors was exclusively SMP:2 or higher, the A4 core WU's brought in the possibility of running single core WU's. So before now projects for OS X were usually looking for 2 or more cores, that has begun to change. People have tested this, including myself, and received WU's on OS X systems set for a single core. So once whatever was causing your system to not get assigned a WU is corrected, you should be able to set to medium and get work. Running at medium on later model Mac's with Core i5 or i7 processors should be less of an issue as the core count reduced by 1 is still SMP:2+ compared to the choices of 1 or 2 cores on your Core 2 Duo.

Joe_H wrote:Up until recently folding for OS X on Intel processors was exclusively SMP:2 or higher

At the time, this seemed like a logical decision. The slowest machine was the Mini and the deadlines were set so that it could contribute. There was considerable discussion about whether there were enough Core Duos to matter or were they all Core2 Duos.

It's not clear what deadlines would apply to WUs assigned to half a Core Duo but I suppose they'd be projects that also are assigned to single-core Windows machines so the deadlines should be reasonable when running OS-X on similar hardware. Unfortunately some projects which run fine on Windows fail when assigned to OS-X so it's not as simple as just allowing Windows projects to be assigned to Macs. They have to be (re-)tested long enough to establish a failure rate.